May 26, 2019

Ross Douthat On The Unifying Fantasy Of The Left

Normally Ross Douthat tries to engage his Upper West Side readership with calm and sweet reason. Overcome, perhaps, by the martial memories of Memorial Day, he is now opting for a truth bomb which was nearly titled "Why Losers Lose":

How Liberalism Loses

An inflexible agenda and a global retreat.

In Australia a week ago, the party of the left lost an election it was supposed to win, to a conservative government headed by an evangelical Christian who won working-class votes by opposing liberal climate policies. In India last week, the Hindu-nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, won an overwhelming electoral victory. And as of this writing, Europeans are electing a Parliament that promises to have more populist representation than before.

The global fade of liberalism, in other words, appears to be continuing.

Are there lessons to be learned?

The fact that populism is flourishing internationally, far from the Electoral College and Fox News, suggests that Trump’s specific faults might actually be propping up American liberalism. If we had a populist president who didn’t alienate so many persuadable voters, who took full advantage of a strong economy, and who had the political cunning displayed by Modi or Benjamin Netanyahu or Viktor Orban, the liberal belief in a hidden left-of-center mandate might be exposed as a fond delusion.

But are these lessons being learned?

That liberal belief may also misunderstand the real correlation of forces in our politics. We had an example this week on our op-ed podcast, The Argument, where my colleague and co-host David Leonhardt interviewed Pete Buttigieg, the Midwestern mayor running for president with promises to build bridges between the heartland and the coasts. Leonhardt pressed Buttigieg on whether that bridge-building might include compromise on any social issues, and the answer seemed to be “no” — in part because Mayor Pete argued that on abortion and guns and immigration most middle Americans already agree with Democrats, that the liberal position is already the common ground.

The strategic flaw in this reading of the liberal situation is that politics isn’t about casually held opinions on a wide range of topics, but focused prioritization of specifics. As the Democratic data analyst David Shor has noted, you can take a cluster of nine Democratic positions that each poll over 50 percent individually, and find that only 18 percent of Americans agree with all of them. And a single strong, focused disagreement can be enough to turn a voter against liberalism, especially if liberals seem uncompromising on that issue.

A pattern of narrow, issue-by-issue resistance is also what you’d expect in an era where the popular culture is more monolithically left-wing than before. That cultural dominance establishes a broad, shallow left-of-center consensus, which then evaporates when people have some personal reason to reject liberalism, or confront the limits of its case.

None of this needs to spell doom for liberals; it just requires them to prioritize and compromise. If you want to put climate change at the center of liberal politics, for instance, then you’ll keep losing voters in the Rust Belt, just as liberal parties have lost similar voters in Europe and Australia. In which case you would need to reassure some other group, be it suburban evangelicals or libertarians, that you’re willing to compromise on the issues that keep them from voting Democratic.

Alternatively, if you want to make crushing religious conservatives your mission, then you need to woo secular populists on guns or immigration, or peel off more of the tax-sensitive upper middle class by not going full socialist.

Liberals need to compromise and prioritize? You see where this is going - "No enemies to the left" implies no compromise with any faction of the right.

But the liberal impulse at the moment, Buttigiegian as well as Ocasio-Cortezan, is to insist that liberalism is a seamless garment, an indivisible agenda that need not be compromised on any front. And instead of recognizing populism as a motley coalition united primarily by opposition to liberalism’s rule, liberals want to believe they’re facing a unitary enemy — a revanchist patriarchal white supremacy, infecting every branch and tributary of the right.

In this view it’s not enough to see racial resentment as one important form of anti-liberalism (which it surely is); all anti-liberalism must fall under the canopy. Libertarianism is white supremacy, the N.R.A. is white supremacy, immigration skepticism is white supremacy, tax-sensitive suburbia is white supremacy, the pro-life movement is white supremacy, anxiety about terrorism is white supremacy … and you can’t compromise with white supremacists, you can only crush them.

Which liberals may do in 2020, because Trump remains eminently beatable.

Well, beating Trump won't be the same as re-taking the Senate and the many GOP governorships, but yes, for the left it would be a start.

But in the long run, the global trend suggests that a liberalism that remains inflexible in the face of variegated resistance is the ideology more likely to be crushed.

"Stop hating, haters" as a response to any and all critics is unlikely to develop into a winning message.

'You know good and damn well the allegations Trump was facing when he took office...'

Hahaha!! You started with 'charges' - a term with a specific legal definition - and then in your reply switched to 'investigations' - a term with a specific legal definition - and have now switched to 'allegations'!!

JIB, 500 attendance is always a somewhat mysterious number. The Speedway doesn’t publish the number of seats they have in grandstands, nor the number of tickets they sell. They claimed the grandstands were sold out this year.

At any given moment, thousands are in restroom or concession lines, or otherwise out of their seats. With the threatened rain, decent numbers of people with tickets who come from some distance chose not to make the trip.

From my history there, looks a pretty good crowd. 200K easily, probably 250K with the infield GA.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, was attacked by several Deep State actors on Sunday after she said on ABC’s This Week that the plot against President Trump by high level law enforcement officials “sounds an awful lot like a coup. And it could well be treason.”

...

RADDATZ: And the president attacks back. Is that the right thing to do?

CHENEY: Look, I think that, you know, what we have seen…

RADDATZ: Retweeting these videos.

CHENEY: I think what is crucially important to remember here is that you had Strzok and Page, who were in charge of launching this investigation, and they were saying things like we must stop this president. We need an insurance policy against this president. That, in my view, when you have people that are in the highest echelons of the law enforcement of this nation saying things like that, that sounds an awful lot like a coup. And it could well be treason. And I think that we need to know more. We need to know what was Jim Comey’s role in all this? These people reported to him. Andy McCabe, reported to him. What was Comey’s role in that? And that is what the attorney general is going to be focused on and should be.

RADDATZ: Let me talk about this, because you saw what the president did with Attorney General Barr. He said he could declassify all this intelligence. Do you worry that sources and methods might be revealed? Do you have any problems with him saying declassify this intelligence even though he won’t give the Mueller report — an unredacted Mueller report to Congress?

CHENEY: Look, first of all, the Mueller report has been delivered to Congress, every single piece of it that could be within the law. The amount that’s been redacted that’s available for key officials in Congress to see, the amount that’s been redacted, is something like less than 2 percent. So, it has been turned over.

Secondly, I have complete confidence in Attorney General Barr in terms of this decision that he’s going to make.

And thirdly, as I said before, he has to have the ability to look at what happened. Think about what happened. Think about the fact that we had people that are at the highest levels of our law enforcement in this nation saying that they were going to stop a duly elected president of the United States, saying they needed an insurance policy against him. That is something that simply cannot happen.

We have to have confidence in our law enforcement. And the attorney general has got to get to the bottom of what happened, how it was that those people were allowed to misuse and abuse their power that way.

Some Twitter dipshit made up a fake quote of DJT saying that Kim Jong Un is smarter and would make a better President than Sleepy Joe Biden and the DNC and MSM assholes started passing it around as legit.

Liz is usually very good but she has several times gone to the fainting couch over Trump tweets. And I recall she really did a "That's not who we are" over the Access Hollywood thing. Glad to see she's thinking clearly on the coup.

Adam Baldwin@AdamBaldwin
Adam Baldwin Retweeted ⚡️ Right Scoop ⚡️IT’S NOT THEIR FAULT THAT THEY WANTED IT TO BE TRUE!⚡️ Right Scoop ⚡️@trscoopSCREENSHOTS: Fake Trump quote goes mega-viral with blue checks who didn’t blue CHECK if it was true (Like Rep. Ted Lieu)https://wp.me/pqwpd-15WW

In a stroke of irony, the New York Times rushed out a story decrying Barr’s investigation and the pending declassification, citing potential risk to a CIA Asset from the declassification. The reality is the article by the New York Times appeared to be designed to actually burn that same CIA source in advance of the pending declassification.

The description provided by the New York Times—male, still alive, long-nurtured by the CIA, close to Putin, highly placed and provided information to the CIA about his involvement in Russia’s 2016 election interference—appears sufficient to allow for foreign intelligence agencies to determine the source’s underlying identity.

The source being discussed by the New York Times was not your run-of-the-mill CIA asset. Former CIA Director John Brennan viewed this source as so important that he “would bring reports from the source directly to the White House, keeping them out of the president’s daily intelligence briefing for fear that the briefing document was too widely disseminated, according to the officials. Instead, he would place them in an envelope for Mr. Obama and a tiny circle of aides to read.”

The article—and the description of the CIA asset provided in the article—appears to be a preemptive move to get information into the public domain in front of the impending release from Barr’s investigation.

BRUSSELS (AP) — A European Parliament election that could reshape the political order across the continent drew toward a close Sunday with the anti-immigrant far right projected to win in France, and Germany’s centrist governing party headed for heavy losses as well.

The four days of balloting across the 28 European Union countries were seen as a test of the influence of the nationalist, populist and hard-right movements that have swept the continent.

Exit polls in France indicated that Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party came out on top, in an astounding rebuke for French President Emmanuel Macron, who has made EU integration the heart of his presidency.

Exit polls indicated the party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel also suffered major losses.

With the stakes high, turnout across the bloc — not counting Britain, which is quitting the EU — was put a preliminary 51%, a 20-year high. An estimated 426 million people were eligible to vote in what was considered the most important European Parliament election in decades. Full results were expected overnight.

The balloting, which began Thursday, pitted supporters of closer unity against those who consider the EU a meddlesome and bureaucratic presence and want to return power to national governments and sharply restrict immigration.

Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, a major figure among the anti-migrant hard-line nationalists, said that he felt a “change in the air” and that a victory by his right-wing League party would “change everything in Europe.”

Mainstream center-right and center-left parties were widely expected to hold on to power in the 751-seat legislature that sits in both Brussels and Strasbourg. But the nationalist and populist parties that are hostile to the EU were expected to make important gains that could complicate the workings of the Parliament.

Do we have any idea what the common denominator is among those who are having trouble posting here? I hope something can be done for them! Is TM aware of the problem? Do we know how many people are affected? Can we somehow take advantage if all the technical expertise here?

Congratulations to the Great (and my friend) Roger Penske on winning his 18th (UNBELIEVABLE!) Indianapolis 500. I am in Japan, very early in the morning, but I got to watch Simon drive one of the greatest races in the history of the sport. I will see them both, & TEAM, at the WH!

Wonder if the US Women's national soccer team will if they win the world cup, with that skank Mega Repino dismissing our flag and anthem. Fuck her. Go USA but she is not how important she thinks she is.

Was listening on the radio and when they interviewed Simon Paginaud he talked about how proud he was to bring the victory to his countrymen, how proud he was to do so and how proud he was to be French.

Some have speculated that Brennan may have leaked the information of a source close to Putin to the NYT:

Let me get this straight: John Brennan calls President Trump treasonous. The next day, he calls the New York Times and apparently reveals to them that the United States intelligence community has placed “a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin”. Unreal… https://t.co/Oa7qeUvtfQ

One of the most shockingly egregious leaks in recent years. This is just a pile of sources and methods that are gone now. And for what? To find ut Trump knows Russia interfered and is lying? Congratulations on this big reveal. https://t.co/a5fImaNx7c

Typepad doesn't think all sites are legit. MSM and a few think tank blogs like Townhall and Heritage, yes. Otherwise, you post the link but it disappears.

I have found that if I add a sentence or two of comment with the link, it WILL post it. Have no idea why this is true.

As far as logging in, I now log in with my Twitter id, as it works every time. The only problem is that when it logs you in, it takes you to the first page. However, if you post in the box on the first page and then hit "post another comment" it will take you to the last page. I hope that is understandable.

We were at the AAA game today, but left early. It was 95 at first pitch. By the 5th inning Ariel was red faced and no amount of chilled Propel would cool her off. She downed a sippie cup on the way home and fell asleep in the carseat.

We moved from the second row behind home plate to the first base side to shaded seats before the game even started. Sparse crowd, too, for a Sunday. I think everyone is at the Lake or Beach. You could probably walk across Lake Lanier today with all the gazillion boats.

We have box seats for next Friday's Braves game. I'll be sure to go pour a milkshake on those evil strike recording racists! ;)

I always post a comment when I try to link a website, and it still disappears. I can't post pix or twitter links anymore, either. I am resigned for now to comments only with an occasional 'verbal' go find this it is important or funny comment, so maybe someone else can bring it back here. Pfft.

--Joe diGenova claims that Russian spy is already dead because Brennan outed him to the NYT's in 2017.--

Is there a better way to shut foreign witnesses up?
Talk and I will too, and you'll die.

Toss in the Iranians, Chinese and Russians rolling up entire networks of our spies and wait some day for the definitive history of just how catastrophic having Barry, Brennan, Clapper, Rice, Power, Jarret, Hilligula, Rhodes and the rest of that merry band of meretricious traitors in charge of things was.